The relevance of the study depends on addressing to the issue of knowledge management in learning and instructing students of post-Soviet sector universities. In this regard, the article is intended to reveal the nature of knowledge management approach compared to the knowledge-based one predominated in Soviet education. The flagship approach of this study is the systemic-activity approach to explain knowledge management advantages for learning and instructing social disciplines in sector universities. The relevant literature is reviewed to show evolution of approaches. It is stated that knowledge reflecting specificity of an industry may be defined as industry-oriented and can be represented by a new international web standard (ontology). To determine significant factors for knowledge absorption with the proposed approach an experiment was conducted. The results prove the didactic potential of ontologies, so the knowledge management approach is considered promising. This article may be of practical interest for professors of sector universities.

Topicality of the research is determined by the fact that it addresses the issue of a gap between actual production and professional education. Digitalization creates ample opportunities for the development of the leading material production industries (transport industry is among them) due to the totality of technologies, including knowledge engineering. This fuels digital transformations of professional education. The form of syllabus presentation is changing due to the use of ontologies as a contemporary standard of knowledge representation, and this ensures semantic openness of educational resources. Information technologies in education are changing: the management of educational paths is assigned to artificial intelligent training agents (AI-based tutors). The existing model of education is changing: it is becoming personalized. Finally, the nature of interaction between the industry and industry-specific universities and colleges is changing as well. The paper provides a business model of interaction between production, science, and professional education through an integrated life cycle of knowledge. The knowledge management system of the industry-specific research and education complex is regarded as a mechanism for implementation of this model. Its structure and tools developed by the team of the Transport Information Technologies research laboratory in the Siberian Transport University (Novosibirsk) are described.

The urgency of the study is stipulated by the problem of professional training of personnel for the leading industries of the material production of the Russian Federation, one of which is the transport industry, in the context of implementation of the digital economy program and the integrated scientific and technological project “Digital Railway”. The nature of knowledge belonging to the intellectual field of the industry is revealed through the synthesis of the humanitarian (associated with man) and formal logical (associated with artificial systems). New requirements make it necessary to refer to modern educational technologies in the e-learning paradigm 3.0. Such technologies are based on knowledge presented in accordance with the international standard ISO/IEC - in the ontology format. In this regard, this paper is aimed at revealing the possibilities of semantic technologies in the development of virtual learning environments for educational organizations in the network structure of sectoral subordination in the open projects model. Development of ontological content is carried out remotely by joint efforts of representatives of the employer and education. FSBEI of Higher Education “Siberian State Transport University” (Novosibirsk) implements an interuniversity project on the development of the multilingual electronic learning environment “Onto.plus” on the basis of new technologies in the format of the digital economy. The proposed educational solution has been tested in the real learning process. Its effectiveness has been proved for the training of future transport industry personnel; the directions of the project development are outlined.

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Digital systems in railways known as “digital railways” have dramatically changed the railway industry and the nature of railway employees’ work. The Digital Railway is in a large extend linked with the knowledge-based economy, knowledge management and knowledge management technologies which have had a significant impact on digital transformations in the industry and professional education. An ontology characterized the cause-effect and aggregative relations reflecting transformation chains in the various spheres of human activity and shedding light on the Digital Railway place in the context of digital economy is presented. The article argues that the Digital Railway role in changing mechanisms of interaction between industry and universities, which are also specialized research centres with closer ties to the industry, is best understood applying to the idea of “a smart contract” that can be reduced to artificial intelligent agents serving as intermediaries providing interaction between the non-human and human roles in a business process. With the smart contract technology, the Digital Railway might provide a precedent in development of the Hybrid Corporate Intelligence based on industry-related knowledge redistributed between artificial intelligent agents and employees. From this perspective, the process of corporate informatization is seen through a system of artificial intelligent agents implying the formalization of operational rules and regulations into a shared knowledge base in a form of ontologies. The proposed idea can be transferred to universities where smart contracts may support professional training as a business process.